In Search of a Different History: The Remains of Burlesque in Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Taking Elin Diamond’s and Rebecca Schneider’s recent work in drama and performance studies as a starting point, this essay looks at two eras of burlesque in Montreal—the 1940s-50s and 2012—tracing a shifting landscape of popular entertainment, politics, religion, and social attitudes toward female sexuality. There is a central question underlying this examination: Why burlesque? Why now (or, rather, again?). I argue that burlesque offers an archive that evokes a different, more glamorous history than the one passed down to women by second-wave feminism. Burlesque also provides an alternative to popular culture’s commodification of female sexuality, technology’s mediation of social life, and heteronormative culture’s privatization of sexuality, giving women—and men—a stage on which to make fun of our cultural fixation with sex and the female body. Both nostalgically looking back and eagerly reaching for the new, neo-burlesque repeats the past as it simultaneously reinvents it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".